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Much of the discussion on fear of radiation misses the essential point of noise in the data. This is more important than it sounds. The best discussion of noise may come from an economist, probably because that field has so much noise in it - just look at the debt ceiling debate.

The famous economist Fischer Black considered noise to be the opposite of information. He did not just consider it to be inaccurate or corrupt data, or irrelevant background information, or data from random sources, he considered more nefarious human and societal sources like hype and intentional disinformation.

The recent astounding decision by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (Radiation Not A Big Deal) can only be interpreted if one understands noise. UNSCEAR’s report confessed that low doses of radiation should not be used to predict cancers in future populations, contrary to what everyone’s been doing for the last 60 years.

The report, along with many new findings (No DNA Damage at 400x Background), supports the observation that radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) have no observable effects on human health and the environment. Less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv) is the region that encompasses annual background levels around the world.

Another way of saying this is “below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr), the effects of radiation disappear in the noise.”

It’s like trying to hear Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon from across the room while operating a buzz saw without hearing protection. And then trying to say it’s the music that caused some of your hearing loss.

Solid Cancers per 100,000 population in the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivor Cohort of 79,901 subjects (data from ICRP).

The classic example of this problem is interpreting the increase in cancer rates of the Japanese Atomic Bomb Survivors (see figure). This figure graphs the cancer occurrences in the survivors using data from the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP 1994). It is clear that high doses of radiation cause an increase in cancer. At low doses, there is no clear increase.

The straight-line portion of these types of curves above Earth background has been the basis for the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis, or LNT. First put forward after WWII, LNT is a supposition that harmful radiation effects follow a linear relationship - increase the dose, increase the risk, increase the cancers, increase the deaths.

The part of this line above 10 rem (0.1 Sv) certainly supports this idea, although doubling the dose does not double the effect like is commonly thought. Doses between 50 and 100 rem (0.5 and 1 Sv) resulted in a 29% increase in cancers over doses between 0.5 and 10 rem (0.005 and 0.1 Sv) even though there was a 1000% increase in dose.

However, below 10 rem (0.1 Sv), the effects disappear completely in the noise - the noise of all the other environmental and genetic effects that cause death. In the 1950s, to be simplistic and conservative, the world governing bodies decided to just draw in that line anyway, all the way down to zero, dictating that there was no threshold.

That seemed easy at the time. Who could imagine what problems it would cause in the future? But notice, that extra tail of a line crosses the entire range of background radiation on Earth, what is considered normal, what humans and every other life form has lived with long before we split the atom.

What that extra tail of a line inadvertently established as policy, though, was that all radiation was dangerous, no matter what kind, for what purpose, or at what dose. Suddenly, just walking outside was dangerous, technically. But not really. No one paid much attention then because there wasn’t much application of nuclear anyway in the ‘40s and ‘50s, except bombs.

However, as this idea slowly crept into regulations, laws, response plans, the medical industry and the Cold War, it grew into a multi-headed Hydra. Legally, we had to care about this. We had to spend billions protecting against what was once background levels. Now anyone can calculate the risk to everyone else, even those who won’t be born for a thousand years. And we have to care about it.

It’s right out of a Road Warrior movie. No wonder the fear of radiation took over the worldview. Science fiction is much more fun to study than real science.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for example. According to the Washington Post (WP Secretary Clinton), Secretary Clinton has spent over 2,000 hours on a plane above 25,000 ft during her tenure as Secretary of State. Because radiation dose increases with altitude, she received an additional 1,740 mrem of high-energy radiation, an astoundingly dangerous dose when viewed through the lens of LNT. Of course, it’s trivial and no one cares about it at all. Indeed, the physical stress of that much travel is actually dangerous to your health, not the rad.

But the radiation risk is calculable in a science fiction sort of way. The same way we calculate the risk of an additional 50 mrem to virtual people in five hundred years from various nuclear waste disposal strategies (Environmental Impact Statement DOE/EIS-0391 as an example). We’ve decided that, in an overall 300 mrem background, reducing this risk by lowering the dose from 50 mrem to something like 10 mrem, is worth, say, spending an additional $100 billion.

Is the risk from 50 mrem worth this? The same risk as moving from Los Angeles to Colorado? Do we generally spend $1 billion to save a life in this country? Could it be better spent on real health care, now? Immunizations? Tackling epidemics? Addressing childhood obesity? Paying down the debt? Outlawing airplane trips? Are virtual people in the future facing a trivial risk more worthy of our help than U.S. citizens now?

This is a societal decision that society has been left out of. That needs to change.